Do Not Feed The Pigeons

I have always been drawn towards portraying feelings of loneliness and melancholy. These are usually the people I see first and that move me the most. I would witness these feelings in many different forms whenever I travelled late at night from a city to another. That’s how the first ideas came about. I like the oxymoron of « shared loneliness » : people that have nothing in common and don’t seem eager to communicate happen to share the same bubble for a few hours. They are forced to live together and maybe find common grounds before going back to their separate lives. To write the film, we decided to spend one night in Victoria Coach Station. Not to travel but only to observe travellers. We were knee deep into this melancholy, but could also feel that a beauty was hidden beneath the dirty sad walls of the station. Something that would reveal itself only if you managed to acknowledge your surroundings. The process of creating the film actually took place at the same time as the first lockdown in the UK and people being separated suddenly had a strange yet poignant resonance with our story. But as everyone was being isolated from the rest of the world, we also witnessed a feeling of community, with people helping each other and coming together.